ce magazine july 2019 issue

Something to enlighten you up
Engadget
Link to this article
The first text message was sent 25 years ago
A lot has changed in a quarter century.
Jon Fingas, @jonfingas
12.03.17 in Mobile
Eric Lafforgue/Art in All of Us via Getty Images
Be prepared to feel ancient -- the first text message is 25 years old. Engineer Neil Papworth sent the first SMS
on December 3rd, 1992, when he wrote "merry Christmas" on a computer and sent it to the cellphone of
Vodafone director Richard Jarvis. It was a modest start, but it ultimately changed technology and even social
norms.
It took a long time for SMS to find widespread adoption, both because of the cellular networks themselves
(coverage was far from ubiquitous in 1992) and phones whose buttons revolved around dialing rather than
typing. But then the smartphone arrived. In the US alone, the volume of messages surged from 12.5 billion per
month in 2006 to 45 billion a year later. By June 2017, there were 781 billion messages passing around in the
country. Messaging was suddenly easy, and SMS was ready and waiting to take advantage of that newfound
freedom.
There's little doubt that texting has influenced communication in the years since. Where texting was once seen
as a rarity or even rude, it's frequently the first choice for communication -- how often are you annoyed when
someone calls you instead of sending a brief message? Accordingly, it's entirely common to see services that are
available through SMS, whether it's ordering pizza or getting music recommendations. Twitter's original 140-
character limit (which was just lifted in November) was built around SMS' 160-character ceiling to enable
tweets in an era before the mobile internet was widely available. The effects of SMS haven't always been
positive (they've facilitated spam, for instance), but it's clear there's no going back.
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